If you are a translator, please make sure your translation is ready at http://translate.chamilo.org. If you're sure your translation is only managed by you, you can export your language files from there, edit them with something like the phpLangEditor extension for Firefox, and import them again. This will probably be much faster.

Most of the active people around here will have noticed that development has been very slow during the month of August. It is likely that it will continue that way until the end of September. But don't worry: That's because we are currently working with a series of organizations who want improvements in a lot of (existing or non-existing) features, and planning takes a whole lot of efforts (and money), so we've been focusing on doing just that.

The good news is that most of these projects are starting to take shape and getting the first round of financial approval, so it is very likely we'll be starting the heavy work of adding new features and fixing reported bugs around the end of September.

There's still not a lot I can say today, but I am very excited by the latest requests we have received, and it might turn Chamilo 1.8.8 into a really innovating e-learning platform (once again).

If you would like to send us patches and new features, please use this tracking system to do so, they will be integrated (if proving useful to most people) with great pleasure. Most of your bug reports will be treated with due care.

If you would like to help the development efforts financially, the association now accepts donations through PayPal, so let us know at info@chamilo.org. If you mention that you want this donation to support the development of 1.8.8, it will directly influence the delay before the release of 1.8.8! I'll make sure of it.

In particular, if you want a fully web mindmapping feature to get into Chamilo 1.8.8, we have everything designed but we lack financial resources. Help us finance it to get real collaborative mindmapping into the new version. If you would like to know more, write to me at ywarnier@chamilo.org. We need €5000 to get that started (which has already been brought down by our efforts for planning it), so if you think your organization is likely to consider financing it, put us in contact with your boss! We know some organizations have a budget to waste before the end of the year... let's waste it in something useful for all!

After a lot of debugging and moving some bugs to 1.8.8 (there is one bug due to character encoding of files uploaded through ZIP in the documents, and possibly affecting SCORM packages as well), we are almost ready to launch Chamilo 1.8.7.1. It will be released tonight (very late during the night) and you will all be able to download it starting tomorrow, Saturday 31st of July.

Please make sure you test it a little bit more and report (or fix, ideally) any bug you would find. You can try an automatically-updated version here: http://chamilodev.beeznest.com (admin/admin).

We're suffering delays in the release of 1.8.7.1, mostly because of other urgent activities that got most of the team stuck doing something else. We'll still try to release this week-end, and we will release in July no matter what.

Please help us resolve bugs. Some of them are really easy (like fixing a translation), some of them much less., but we'd appreciate you having a look at the list of 74 bugs remaining (most of them minor) to try and fix them all in this version rather than in version 1.8.8 (still a few months away).Some of them only require an approval from someone testing them on http://chamilodev.beeznest.com (updated every two hours). If you have a bit of free time, don't use lousy excuses! ;-) Help us squish these bugs!

We intend to release 1.8.7.1 on the 14th or the 20th of July. This version will be a patching version. No new major feature, only small improvements and bugfixes. No database or file structure (other than files addition) update should be necessary.

Please make sure you spread the word and let translators know they should update their translations.

To all developers concerned, Chamilo 1.8.7 will be released today (around 5pm, Paris time). You are invited to proceed with a last test and fix minor issues if you find any.

This is the end of a 4 months-long effort almost entirely supported by the BeezNest team and a few of you guys and girls, but it also marks the beginning of a new era for the software, and a stronger step away from our roots (still respecting the same initial goals of better education through ease of use for all). It is vital that we use 1.8.7 as a ground to get a lot of contributors in, and reduce the activity of a single company in proportion to the community's. The association will make the required efforts to increase the developers base, and provide the community with excellent developers and teachers that can make us go further, faster and better.

We will have a first stable release attempt on Thursday the 20th of May. This means that all people with tasks assigned in the list of tasks for 1.8.7 (http://support.chamilo.org/versions/show/13) should make their best efforts to try and close them soon (if they want them to be fixed for the 1.8.7 release and not wait probably 4 months or so for the next release).

I will be sending an e-mail to the translators within a few minutes to ask them to update all translations of 1.8.

Please let me know directly if you cannot manage the tasks you have been assigned to. There's only about 45 minor bugs still pending review or fixes, but that's enough to keep us busy until Thursday. Please take a few hours of your (super-valuable) time to check these!

As you may have seen through the Roadmap page (http://support.chamilo.org/projects/chamilo-18/roadmap), we are closing in on the BETA milestone for the 1.8.7. There are no big implementation left that hasn't been started yet (PENS is the one that has been started most recently).

A lot of what is currently scheduled for 1.8.7 STABLE will be moved to 1.8.7 BETA or 1.8.7.1 as we continue towards a BETA release.

This being said, the major efforts of converting portals contents to UTF-8 have already been started by Ivan Tcholakov, our youngest external team member (http://support.chamilo.org/account/show/33) and we will continue working on that during the next 2 weeks.

We would like, also, to add a messaging hook system (we discussed that internally and never got it developed and a recent report on 2.0 roadmap made me remember it) that will allow the administrator to configure which event send messages to who and through what channel. With this, we should have the 4 golden features of 1.8.7:- migration of content and interface to UTF-8 (internationalization, here we come!)- attendance sheets (as a new, flexible tool, usable through the gradebook)- HR manager dashboard (with nice charts and a plugin system and all)- messaging system

Of course, a lot of other features have already been included, but that's not the point here.

We encourage you to report bugs and suggestions. After the ALPHA release, no new feature will be developed and no database structure change will be accepted and focus will be put on fixing remaining bugs before reaching the BETA stage.

An ALPHA release is a release meant to show that the system works, make it easily installable for testers and make sure a wider audience can start reporting bugs. It also stops development for all big features. There might be several ALPHA releases before the BETA.

The BETA release cuts the development for minor new features, and marks the transition from development to pure bugfixing. No more database structure changes are accepted from this point, but inserts can still be made and new files added.

The Release Candidates (RC) releases are meant for pur testing and reporting of new bugs. No major bugs is supposed to be found at this stage, but that could happen, in which case another RC is required before the release of the stable version.